


A Sealskin Coat

by willowbilly



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Animal Death, Blood and Gore, Childhood Trauma, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Feels, Gender Identity, Historical Fantasy, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inuit Characters, Inuk Character, NB/NB, Non-Binary Goodsir, Non-Binary Silna, Nonbinary Character, Original Character(s), Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Seal Hunting, Selkie!Goodsir, Selkies, Slow Burn, Subsistence Hunting, Supernatural Elements, Temporary Character Death, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2020-03-06 01:49:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18841177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: When she cuts the seal open a man slides out from the skin.





	1. Chapter 1

When she cuts the seal open a man slides out from the skin.

It had been an unusual seal to begin with. Not one of the small ringed seals with their silvery spotted coats which are most at home among the floes: a nattiq. Nor was it one of the bearded seals, an ugřuk.

That is what Silna had thought she'd possibly caught when she had lifted herself to her feet and plunged her harpoon down into the lead in the ice, down to where there had been that wavering flicker of movement in the depths beyond the ice's underwater walls of luminous blue. When the usually sly, shy seal, in its increasing breathlessness and with the unclouded spring-day sun beckoning and dazzling its eyes, had decided to surface, rounding the edge of the ice floe from below in a graceful twist and rushing right up to where Silna was so patiently poised.

This seal is much larger than the ringed seals which she had been there there to hunt, for one. Longer than she was tall and therefore _far_ heavier as well, and she'd glimpsed its longer and more convex muzzle as its whiskers had just been dimpling the smooth surface of the water, and as the water had risen with it, pushed upward by the seal's own speeding mass.

Had she known in advance how large an animal it truly was, she wouldn't have tried for it. Not while hunting alone, and certainly not in so unprepared a manner as this.

And yet, through honed reflex and without thought, Silna had found herself rising and making the strike, and so Silna braces herself against that which she cannot for her own sake release.

The seal's first thrashing resistance against the harpoon line almost takes Silna off her feet and its throes only intensify from thereon out.

Her harpoon had caught it under its front right flipper, and the ivory toggling head had penetrated through the blubber of the seal's side and deep into the muscle where it had rotated as designed and lodged itself sideways, firmly securing Silna's attached harpoon line even as she pulls back and discards the detachable shaft upon the shock of the impact. Over the course of her fight to drag the immense seal from the water and onto the ice Silna's harpoon head in the seal and the line in her hands had held; the initial strike had so wounded the seal that the hunter's endurance and wiles eventually prevail over that and those of her prey's, and Silna hauls the seal far enough away from the lead that she can finally be confident it will not escape her.

It is midday by then, the sun high. The caribou fur of Silna's lightweight atigi is soaked with the sweat which it has wicked from her skin and she aches from long exertion. The seal is panting and sometimes barking with its distress and the blood of its grievous injury has smeared a path on the ice in its wake. It still scrabbles with its claws to drag itself away, but the tough ugřuk skin soles of Silna's kamiik likewise scuff against the ice as she runs nimbly around its streamlined bulk and into a better position from which to break its spine.

She kills the seal by clubbing it at the base of its skull with one strong blow and another to be safe, then stepping on the neck with her complete weight to ensure the spine's lethal break; she would never be so exhausted that she couldn't efficiently put an end to its pain. While it was not as clean a kill as she'd have preferred, it had been one which was as merciful as she was able to make it, and she can forgive herself for that.

On closer inspection Silna sees that what she has caught isn't a bearded seal, either. It's some species which Silna has not seen before. Huge and pale, mottled almost as a narwhal is mottled and with a general facial shape which in character almost more resembles a caribou than a nattiq, yet it seems to be an ordinary animal in all other respects. Some wanderer from faraway seas, perhaps, but nothing more.

Nothing more than that, or so she tells herself, as she feels the solidity and the warmth of the big grey seal through its sleek wet fur. The last of the seal's warmth seeps into the blisters which its strength had put into the palms of Silna's stubborn hands. The hotter sun beats down upon the back of her neck and the air is fresh and crisp and sweet as she straightens to catch her breath.

She and her family will eat very well thanks to this seal's sacrifice of itself. Silna smiles and then laughs, letting herself rejoice in her gratitude, and in the unlikelihood of her own achievement, and in the simple fact that she and those who depend on her will not go hungry. The wind strokes coolly across her sweaty brow and she tips her head to pour out her brief burst of jubilation to the sky.

As is right, and before she goes about any other task, she pours clean drinking water into the animal's mouth to quench its thirst. She can only imagine how parched their long struggle and a life in saltwater would have made it.

It is only later, after she has angled the blade of her ulu so as not to damage the edges of the seal's pelt, and as she makes the first smooth, straight slice through the skin and blubber, that Silna realizes there is something rather amiss.

She cuts open the seal.

Where the intestines and other innards should be there is instead a man.

He slips out wet and easy and covered in blood, expelled through the thick insulation of the sealskin's blubber slick and naked as any animal being birthed, but there is no seal left inside of the skin when he is gone. Just an empty, unprocessed pelt, the seal's skeleton and everything else having apparently melted _into_ the form of this man.

The ivory amulet in the pouch which Silna keeps on a braided cord around her neck jolts and shivers like a live lemming. Every hair on her scalp prickles in abrupt awareness of the obvious and she starts away from the man in shock.

This is not a human being before her.

Silna might have wondered if the man from the seal is an aŋakkuq, were she not one herself, and had she also never heard of an angakkuq having ever transformed themself in quite this way. Right away she knows that he is not one of those talented aŋakkuit like her father who are able through enormous effort to change their shape, nor was he a normal human person whose form had been changed. More likely he is a tuurŋaq. There are tuurŋait, inurajait, which come in the guises of men, and many times when a bad spirit cannot disguise itself as a good one it will dress itself as something else. As something similar.

In the warm spring sunlight, on the bright ice and under the deep clear sky, this man's skin shines through the dappled patina of blood with deathly pallor. There is also a prominence to his eyebrows and his nose and a flatness to his cheeks; he has the look of a qablunaaq, as the qablunaat have been described to her by others who have seen them, and as she has seen some of them for herself in dreams, as impressions.

But she has never seen an Inuk of this man's like _in person._ His appearance might be as queer to the qablunaat as much as it is to her, but he may also, for a qablunaaq, appear perfectly ordinary.

Silna does not concretely know and she cannot rule anything out because _a live man has just come out of the dead seal she had caught._

The man is as real and as solid to the touch as the seal, at any rate. His skin gleams nearly white as bleached bone in the streaks and fingerprints left by her hands on his shoulders as she rolls him supine, though the flesh of him is warm and soft and _living_ beneath her grip, and his chest heaves in little aborted spasms.

It is as if he has not seen the sun for a very long time, for him to be so cold a color this far into spring, and his face is almost entirely obscured by a thick coarse beard and by the unkempt mop of his dark, curly hair, which is soaked black with the blood but is so curly as to remain discernibly springy anyways. There is even a line of wispy black hair which runs from his nape and down the uppermost line of his spine before it fades out. His facial hair arcs higher up his cheeks and extends further down his throat than it has on any man she's ever met and when she gets him settled fully onto his back she sees that not only his chest but even his navel is heavily thatched with it.

He coughs without intervention, spits up a fountain of clear drinking water now tainted with red mucus, and then he breathes. His ordinary human mouth gapes open like a black pit amidst all the hair. His teeth are a little small, the canines pointed while the front teeth are square, but they are otherwise also unremarkably human and of pleasing symmetry and good condition.

His downright furry chest rises as he inhales, the flat plane of his stomach hollowing and his ribs pressing out against that pallid sun-spurned skin, and Silna thinks of pressure ridges and the wintertime pack.

His first exhalation of breath smells like the inside of a seal's lungs. Like what Silna would have _expected_ to find inside this one. A damp meatiness is in the air of it.

Then the next breath is just breath. The breath of something which eats many fishes. The smell of a seal's mouth, with all its stronger more doglike dentition, and with all its similarly bristling whiskers.

The seal's skin still has a face of its own, albeit collapsed and warped. It has eyelids and some of the inner nerve and connection tissues which would fit around the eye's missing spheres, and, yes, whiskers and teeth, though there are no eyeballs, and there is no tongue, and, besides most of the face and particularly the muzzle, the head lies somewhat deflated without its skull. The whole of it is padded into pooling by the shape of its own mostly intact fat and it is split only by the slit which she'd made down its middle from chin to vent. The digestive system mysteriously ends and extends no further than the incomplete jaw. The entrance to the esophagus merely melds seamlessly into the gore which clings unevenly to the white fat. No longer does a jawbone hold together the structure of the mouth, though the nose retains its cartilage.

There is nothing much at all left inside of the seal besides the blubber. No meat, no bones. No organs.

Keeping the strange man under strictest observation in the corner of her eye, Silna pushes up her sleeve to bare her arm, kneels parallel to the sealskin, and reaches into the cut, its flesh swallowing her flesh. Her hand fits through the slit in the skin and the blubber, up the throat, and pokes through the mouth without encountering any answers, her fingernails now caked with scarlet and her arm slimy.

The teeth, and the gums in which they are rooted, seem to be anchored by collagen to the inside of the mouth. She cannot tell how. This is not how any living being which she has ever taken apart has been put together, and it makes no sense.

Silna leans over the bulk of the sealskin to check and she finds that the man which has come from the seal has his tongue. It is a normal human tongue.

There is a single fish scale resting on it, and when she tentatively scoops it out of his mouth and onto her bloody fingertip it glitters there, silver, and foreign to her. Bright as a star where it is perched upon the callous-edged whorls of her fingerprint. She does not know what fish would have such a scale, just as she does not know what seal would have a creature shaped like a qablunaaq inside of it.

She flicks the scale from her finger, extremely averse to keeping it upon her person, and it lands on the edge of his clavicle.

Every part of the man's body is accounted for, and with extra parts besides, for his fingers and toes are... webbed. The keratin of his nails is almost opaque, almost black, more like the stuff of claws or horn than of human nails. Both his fingernails and toenails are of this.

The man does not move. He sleeps insensate as a child safe in the back of a mother's amauti. He does not rouse when Silna taps his shoulder nor when she hovers her hand above his mouth to measure his breath nor even when she sets her palm and then her ear against his chest to check that he has a beating heart. Which he does.

She cautiously picks up and manipulates his hands. She flexes his limp fingers in hers and palpates the thick, flexible skin which stretches so oddly between them, and everything moves as though healthy and natural. His hand is wholly corporeal in hers.

There are empty slots where the claws on the sealskin's flippers should be.

Silna's heart is and has been pounding in her chest, curiosity and trepidation at war within her. The sound of her own heartbeat has steadily grown in her ears since first sight of this man until its beating is now as of a drum's.

The man is still gasping and seems too weak to so much as tug his hand from hers, but she does not know what he is, or whether he is good or bad, and his peculiar hands are larger than hers are. He is larger than she is.

She drops his hand, scalded by an unexpected and somewhat belated surge of fear, and his arm falls to the ice.

The music of the breathing game has begun to rise in her ears. It is not Silna's voice, this wordless, beautiful, breathful throat singing in its implacably quick and complex ever-building rhythm, this woman's singing which growls and spikes in precise complementary counterpoint to Silna's drumming heart, and Silna has never heard this voice sing _this song_ before. But Silna knows this voice, knows it as different from her own voice or any other voices, and it is telling her something she would never have known otherwise.

Her hearing this is not uimmaktuq; not losing one's mind. This is part of what makes her an aŋakkuq who is able to follow the good example of her father. This, and Silna's father having bumped heads with her to initiate her into the vocation, enables her to practice aŋakkuuniq: the power of the shamans. Gifts such as this come to many Inuit in many different ways, and Silna is one of the many to whom a gift comes, yet it has never before been so loud as this for her.

The man makes a noise when his arm hits the ice. A little whimper of complaint which wrinkles his nose, and not a noise of serious hurt.

His eyes open.

The singing ceases.

His eyes do not meet Silna's, and she stays frozen as the drifting gaze passes over her and instead lands on the sealskin as if wandering without seeing and blindly drawn to its destination by unconscious will alone.

For an instant his irises take up the entirety of his eyes and their color is an eerie blue-gray so dark as to be black, like a seal pup's when freshly opened to the world, but they are not the giveaway red eyes of a malevolent ijiraq. They reflect the sealskin in them in a way which makes the reflection appear to be a full and living seal once more. As if, while his eyes do not move, the reflection in them... does. Just for a moment.

Silna blinks and the man's irises are suddenly an ordinary brown, albeit a light brown flecked with unusual freckles of green, and he is squinting at the sealskin in a very dazed and helpless sort of way. A newborn way.

The seal man also blinks a few times, his gaze coming a little more into focus though his pupils remain dilated. He is mildly farsighted, she ascertains, as well as plainly bewildered and seemingly careworn. The blood has trickled into the light wrinkles at the outside corners of his sorrowful deep-set eyes, picking them out berry-crimson, their splayed, downward-curving patterns ones of heat-cracked earth in his bloodied-snow flesh. His wet eyelashes are clumping and the trickling sheen of blood collects thickly in the lines where his upper eyelids fold back; his strong, dark eyebrows are unsurprisingly bolder yet for having caught the majority of the blood and they have a long, anxious cant to them.

As soon as the man appears to understand what it is that he is looking at his eyes widen in alarm and his body jerks with abrupt vitality, his chest heaving as he begins to hurl himself upright and to throw his arm toward the sealskin.

Toward Silna, as well, for the sealskin is a low barrier between them.

She moves to place her knife to his jugular more out of that same overactive reflex than out of wisdom.

The man comes to an equally reflexive stop, his back still arched, his throat hovering below the ulu's edge. The keen slate blade sings in the faintest of voices as his hair and skin scrapes ever so lightly against it.

It says not to kill him.

Silna notices that the rest of his hair has tumbled back from his forehead, the drenched coils still dripping streams of blood. The red spatters of it melt out beneath him into long, feathery tendrils of bittersweet pink on the thaw-polished surface of the ice.

As she watches, his pupils begin to shrink, until they are as small as awl punctures beneath the weightless power of Hiqiniq's overwhelming light, and he blinks some more. Finally he seems to _see_ her, squinting up at her through tangled, gummy eyelashes as intelligent awareness dawns in his expression.

His forehead is wiped a little cleaner than the rest of his face, from where his hair had rested and then slid away, so that his fearful brow shines almost as does the fine walrus ivory handle of the ulu in Silna's hand.

There is an old scar on his side which she must have overlooked. It is in the same place as where her harpoon had wounded the seal. When he inhales, the tight, shiny mark of the corresponding lump of scar tissue glides off the lowermost rib and falls into the shadow of his rib cage for just a moment. The bunched-up muscles in his stomach quiver.

“Were you this seal?” she asks, taking care to show none of her fear, and she remembers to pull away the ulu so that she no longer threatens his throat.

The seal man sags until he is again resting flat on the ice. He collapses as fast as the seal had swam upward, all in a careless rush. Shining grains of old, packed snow crunch beneath his head, his hair and the sunset puddle of his own diluted blood haloing it, and the tiny fish scale stuck to the edge of his collarbone flashes as he breathes.

“I _am_ this seal,” he says back. “Will you steal my skin?”

He does not say this in Inuktitut, much less Nattiliŋmiutut, but this is somehow what she hears it as, and he has a light, meek voice with which he speaks softly and quickly.

“I will not take what is yours,” she says.

“Oh,” says he. “Oh, what a relief. Thank you. My name is Harry Goodsir, by the way.” The bloodied seal man smiles to her, very sweetly and genuinely, and he holds out one of his hands toward her, the blade of his hand perpendicular to the ice and his thumb pointing up. The sunlight glows through the skin which is pulled taut from his thumb, and as he puts out his hand he also rolls nearer, onto his shoulder. From there he then props himself up to his elbow and shifts his center of gravity so that he balances mainly on his hip. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” says this seal, this Harry Goodsir, as he proffers his hand.

The webbing only extends so far as the middle joints of his fingers. He pulls his hand back toward himself very quickly when Silna does nothing in return except to study him with her concealed trepidation bubbling in her chest, and after another moment Harry Goodsir puts his other hand over that hand to hide it in what seems to be self-conscious habit, though a habit which he himself is adept at ignoring.

The flexible webbing folds smooth as a waterbird's wings to its body when he puts his fingers flush together, making the delicately-blubbery excess skin almost impossible to see, and when he curls his hands into loose, neat fists, his odd fingernails are no longer visible to an onlooker, either. There is only mortal angularity; just prominent knuckles and blue veins. Just a folded pair of very _human_ paws.

He has human ears, too, half-hidden in his hair. Blood picks out the whorls of them. The great grey seal which she had pulled up had and has no ears on the outside of its head, the same as the earless silhouette of these waters' seals. Same as the ringed seal of which she knows, though the grey seal's head had been different; more robust. Its nose almost arching and the set of its nostrils more parallel.

Had there been any green in its eyes when the sealskin was in possession of them?

There are only empty slots in the flippers where the seal's claws had been.

“You aren't going to kill me, are you?” Harry Goodsir asks.

Silna glances to the sealskin and then back to him. “Haven't I already done so?” Silna asks in return, but she asks him this gently; she imagines that it might be difficult to hear such a question from one's killer, and she intends to treat this creature with compassion.

It is best to treat everything with compassion, in any case, but especially so when interacting with the otherworldly. The ijirait which exist with the tuktuit on the land, for instance, occasionally kill people. At other times respect may earn their respect.

The seal man laughs: a brief eruption of mirthful grief. “I suppose you did,” he says, and he drops his eyes almost bashfully.

He's also casually dropped his upper thigh over his lower so as to try and tuck his genitals from view, one knee braced against the ice in front of the other leg's thigh. His knees are ruddy patches, his legs so hirsute they appear covered in mosquitoes. His hands continue to fidget uneasily and the knuckles shift and whiten through his reddening skin.

Silna realizes that his entire bodily complexion has gradually been deepening, a less deathly, less translucent, more mortal an undertone overtaking that of the initial stark blubber-white, while the heat of him is also flushing outward in nudity's crude defense against the chill. Silna, fully dressed, is still moderately overheated in her lightest set of clothing, though now only her armpits are damp with perspiration.

As she continues to watch him, one of Harry Goodsir's nervous hands takes flight to wipe at his face and to groom his hair and his beard into place. Through the oily slick of blood, the bright sunlight strikes glints of dark brown from the depths of his curly hair, though his coarser beard and body hair remain more a dull black even as they dry. His skin is beginning to be textured with gooseflesh and his hair ruffles in the breeze.

Even lying naked and sideways on the ice in the way that a seal would, he is looking more and more like a living man, and less like the seal-creature which he also is.

He looks more than a little scared, too.

“I'll not kill you a second time,” she promises him. “And I won't harm you. You need not fear me.”

“I'm not like the others you've met, you know. Other beings. If you have met others,” Harry Goodsir says, picking a clump of bloody tissue from his mustache and smoothing his mustache away from his mouth. “You would know this already, I suppose, but I'm not. I'm not from here, I don't think.” He finds the silver fish's scale when he scratches at his collarbone and absently licks it from his fingertip without pause. “I don't really know where it is I _am_ from, actually,” he says, and he lifts his gaze to stare out at the distant horizon, out to where the ice meets the land. His eyes do not so much squint as they do cringe with wistfulness, his upraised arm now contemplatively arresting itself in the act of combing a coil of hair behind his ear. “I've been... in the ocean, for. Well. For a very long time.”

The flecks of green which congregate most thickly around the tiny black abysses of his pupils are the only traces of that color as far as can be seen, the rest being all pristine white and cerulean and that rich bright sunlight, the rocky line of the shore a rough, faraway streak of gray, and even so that green is not the green of moss or other growing things but the green of an unsettled sea; Silna would never have met this being, this sea mammal which is Harry Goodsir, upon the land, but neither does he belong to the waters in which she'd found him.

“Are you not of this world?” she asks him, for though she is not sure, she thinks that he must have been born just as humans and animals are. He has not one but _two_ bodies of physical flesh. She's touched him and she knows that he exists in this place where she does. He breathes the same air, and has the air in his lungs, and from how he'd reacted with her ulu to his neck he fears to suffer the same as most any person. He was relieved when the blade had gone.

“I am of this world,” Harry Goodsir says, looking at Silna again as if he is not himself fully convinced, but he is not lying.

When Harry Goodsir looks at her she sees their soul. It's a bright and desperate and desperately gentle thing, and from it Silna knows that _whatever_ Harry Goodsir is, there is no ill will in them.

“I'm of this world as I am both human and seal. But I'm not from _this world's_ sea. I'm not... I'm not _of_ this sea. Not of _this_ Sea.”

“Then where is it that you are from?” Silna asks.

“Well, you see, ah. That's the bother.” He smiles a plaintive, self-deprecating smile, and there is queasy terror underneath it. “I... I do believe that I'm... quite lost.”

Silna holds out her drinking water to him so that he may have some. He had spat out the water which she had put into his seal's mouth when he'd awoken, after all, and he will still be thirsty.

He hesitates, and wipes his hand fairly clean against the slushy surface of the ice, and then he reaches out with that trembling hand and accepts the flask from her with traces of his own blood yet remaining beneath his broad dark nails.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keep an eye on the tags as the fic progresses! And if there are any specific warnings which I overlook pls hmu and tell me so I may Add Them. Within this chapter: Light references to Needles and Tattooing, Drowning, Child Death

In the distance Silna can see her big sister Ivalu's firstborn. He carries the name Nikšaaqtuarjuk in honor of Aja's mother Little Ptarmigan, after she came to Ivalu's mother Kiinaq in dreams and asked her for a drink. Silna, then around twelve years old and present at the birth in the iglu, had immediately exclaimed _“Niŋiunnuałługa!”_ in a cry of irrepressible joy upon seeing the baby, and has called him her darling little grandmother ever since.

Silna had been particularly close with this one of her grandmothers. Silna's aŋajuk Ivalu, the eldest daughter of Aja's sister Kiinaq who is the person from whom Silna had been adopted, had often resided in the iglu or the tupiq next over, in the dwelling of Silna's birth parents, and later with her own husband, Makłak, who became hunting partner to Aja. Following the death of _her_ husband, Niŋiuq Nikšaaqtuarjuk had lived with Aja, moving in with her only son and his wife before _they_ adopted the one who would live to be their only child, Silna, and so Silna had known Grandmother Little Ptarmigan from the earliest moments onward, and they had doted on each other. Nikšaaqtuarjuk had affectionately called Silna her little husband much as Nikšaaqtuarjuk now calls Silna his grandchild.

Like both Silna's grandmother and the rock ptarmigan from whence their shared atiq sprung, Nikšaaqtuarjuk was compassionate, gentle, and calm, and was born a child of winter; he could wait standing over a seal's breathing hole in perfect stillness and comfort for as long as needed, whether the snow accumulated over his parka to round the small peaked crown of his hood and blanket his shoulders like a plush ptarmigan cape of winter plumage, or whether it was so cold that one's saliva instantly froze with a crack upon being spat onto the ice. While most other winter children are given the skin of a raven, he was cleaned then clothed at birth with a feathered aqiřgiq skin, which protects him as a powerful aarŋuaq to this day.

Now at sixteen he is a tall and slender youth growing into a genuine hunter whose patience, good aim, and birdlike light-footedness all serve him very well. He'd caught the ugřuk which had given Silna the black rawhide for her own kamiik's soles, though she had chewed them herself, crimping the edge of a piece of ugřuk skin into shape for each of the atuŋaak with her teeth, as had been demonstrated by the ever-patient women of Silna's family, by her birth mother, and her adoptive mother, and by such as the expert skin-sewer Nikšaaqtuarjuk, who had stitched the tattoos into Ivalu's uvinik.

Nikšaaqtuarjuk is still so far away, coming to them from one of the breathing holes closer to the land, and the lower half of his recognizably lanky silhouette is cut into footlessness by the heat haze over the ice; Silna had left him and his dog at an aglu on safer ice and ventured to where this shorefast sheet's edge meets the floes on her own, and she expects she'll face her family's censure for this. Not from her darling little niŋiuq, but by someone; Silna thinks of how curt and frank her aŋajuk becomes when she's suffered a scare and suppresses a grimace until she has made sure that Harry Goodsir is not looking.

Harry Goodsir remains ostensibly oblivious, drinking from the steeply tilted seal-leather waterskin. He drinks most of the water and then apologizes for doing so, as soon as he has lowered the waterskin and gained sufficient air for the words.

Silna doesn't know how to respond to that, and so she doesn't. She just nods, gets up, and starts packing away her things because she is tired and she really wants to go home. She runs the memory of his precise response over and over, and understands less of it every time, the veneer of her own language stripping away upon reexamination as some charred thing shrivels from the scouring reality of fire.

She's already decided that she's going to try and bring Harry Goodsir back with her.

There are two compelling reasons for this: If Harry Goodsir _has_ fooled her, and he _does_ mean her or anyone else harm, then Silna's father will see this untoward influence which has been cast over her and they will deal with this Harry Goodsir from thereon out to prevent any evil from taking place; another aŋakkuq or an elder would likely be able to tell if Harry Goodsir is toward bad through observation of Silna's behavior alone, even if Silna has been so affected that she herself cannot tell, just as they would be able to see the signs in her were she to have been tricked by an evil tuurŋaq.

And she can't in good conscience leave Harry Goodsir to fend for himself as he is. The trepidation with which he looks at the ice around himself makes Silna sure that he would not fare well.

With the way that he's also still lying his naked body on the bare ice she wonders if Harry Goodsir would wait to succumb to exposure right there, should he be left to his own devices at the moment. He seems stunned into inaction. Or he may simply be that exhausted. It would seem to be an exhausting thing, to be in one shape, and then... transformed, or released, or _reborn_ into that of another body entirely, and never mind having been harpooned in between.

“Is that what you used?” Harry Goodsir asks her, when he sees her licking her ulu clean of blood and tucking it away into the protection of its furred carrying pouch; he draws his fingertips down his stomach to illustrate. There's a very faint scar neatly bisecting him from beard downward, so silvery pale on his cold skin and beneath his thick black hair as for its precise start beneath the blood-dampened forest of his beard to be invisible, though her ulu had never so much as grazed Harry Goodsir's human body when she had cut it from the seal one.

“Yes,” she says, and leaves that at this lest it be fraught for her to go further. She forces herself to stop looking at the scars she gave him, those phantom cuts through uvinik, through human skin, lurking under umik, where the beard starts on his throat, and is relieved to see that he has been staring not at her but down at his hands.

She puts the ulu into her seal hunting bag. The ivory unaaq point she took from where she'd speared it into Harry Goodsir's seal side is there among the other things to bump against it through the pouch and she must remind herself not to feel guilty.

Silna has parked her sled very nearby, as, before that which was a seal had become a person, she had hoped to be piling said qamut with what was once a seal. The waterskin is still with her visitor, but most other items which belong in the hunting bag which is carried over her shoulder and which bumps against her hip as she walks are already there, and Silna finds the hunting bag's place atop the qamut with the easy speed of long practice, and loosely ties it down.

She strains her ears to keep track of Harry Goodsir's movements as she does so, but he does not try to sneak up behind her and bash her brains in, which is another significant point in his favor. There are a very many points in Harry Goodsir's favor which she has so far accumulated. It's difficult not to be relaxed around him upon increased exposure to his presence, his peculiar, foreign qaumaniq as bright as those of tuurŋait or aŋakkuit, and so pleasant to be around Silna feels like a sunning seal basking in it.

She exchanges her seal hunting bag for a furred scrap of skin and the only other coat which she has brought with her and she brings those things back to Harry Goodsir.

He is now sitting up in the same spot with his legs modestly folded and with the mass of the sealskin pulled partly over himself so that the sealskin's upper body drapes heavily across his lap and entirely hides his middle. The fur is beginning to dry in the sunlight, going paler, the mottled pattern of gray and grey rendered hazier without the darkness of the water exaggerating the contrast between differing shades, and as it dries the brown undertint in it fades to wan. Harry Goodsir's hands press the fur down and smooth the ocean-swell blanket of it across his knees, his human legs pressed together and rounded almost away under the sleekening mass of the sealskin's blubber, but he stops this petting of it and grips the edges of the skin possessively tight when Silna approaches.

It strikes her as a defensive gesture more than anything. She slows down, not wanting to spook him any more.

That strained smile of his cracks his mouth, wielded at her in ashamed apology, and his hands very consciously relax until they are opened flat. He smooths the skin's shining fur down once more, and after a moment seems unable to keep himself from looking at his own hands as he moves them across the sealskin, his downcast gaze going melancholy.

“Here,” she says, crouching a comfortable distance from him and then holding out the coat. “You can wear this.”

It's an amauti of the long tail style called an akulik, but she does not expect that this Harry Goodsir wearing a woman's clothes will go against those prohibitions which are best followed in all things, similar as to how her family knows that Silna is not quite a woman and so need not abide by as many articles as some; what Silna _does_ suspect is that the rules by which Harry Goodsir's existence abides are not quite those with which she is familiar.

“Oh, I couldn't possibly,” says Harry Goodsir, with very polite conviction; he shakes his head as he speaks and taps the auk-reddened ice with the flats of his fingernails to emphasize. “It _wouldn't_ be... wouldn't be _right_ of me to take advantage of your generosity like that, you see. Especially after coming out of nowhere to deprive you of a good many meals, as I did,” and at the last he vaguely gestures an arm over himself in quick, deferential demonstration of what they would not be eating.

Silna folds and sets the akulik down next to him, outside of the blood which has crept from him and into the grainy surface of the ice all around him, and puts the furred hide scrap on top of it. “This, you can use to clean off all that blood on you,” she says, pressing her hand down against the scrap. She stares him in the eyes and keeps a neutral face, and she watches the entire life cycle of his reluctance to accept help as it plays out with painful plainness across his expressive features.

“I'd be meant to be doing that before putting the coat on, then, yes?” Harry Goodsir finally says, capitulating to common sense with this weak attempt at a jest.

She twitches her eyebrows upward and smiles at him. Just a very small, deliberate thing, to set him at ease.

The last of his reservations melt away as he practically blossoms in response, bright and soft as a flower of the lushest tundra, and she blinks against this brightness, and she turns from him to fetch and pack her unaaq, and her akłunaaq, and her seal float.

The avataq, Silna's seal float, is a nattiq skin, inflated with breath and made airtight, and it had kept the great gray seal from diving far enough for Silna to lose him or drown like Lumaajuuq, dragged under as she was by the whale to become the narwhal. It rolls and bounces, a little boulder yearning to be a cloud, tethered by the akłunaaq which Silna coils up under her arm as she reels both float and harpoon line after herself. Her feet want to hurry, and she must watch their speed as she goes. Her hands, too, are trembling, with the comedown of the rush.

Silna more than half-expects Harry Goodsir to disappear behind her back at any moment as she packs, to vanish with neither trace nor explanation while she is busy, but he doesn't. He roughly towels himself off then puts on the akulik while she is not looking and so he is dressed by the time that she does.

He smiles when he notices her attention returning to him, continuing to adjust the fall of the amauti's large ruffed hood with his fastidious hands and without making solid eye contact; he smiles at her every time that she looks at him. Friendliness serving as another defense, perhaps, as an ingratiation, for the fear in the expression had gone from him only very briefly, and only when Silna had smiled at him in return.

He looks down again before she can do so to reassure him, back to the sealskin. Studying his own shed remains in what becomes bereaved, horrified fascination, his hand hesitating at his throat to hide his fingertips in the hood's thick white ruff.

The wrung-out hide scrap is tucked around the back of his neck to keep his damp hair from touching the caribou fur inside Silna's akulik, and while Silna appreciates this attempt, the blood will most probably have stained, what with his bath having been by necessity so quick. The puddles of water on the ice around the sealskin are dyed into varying pinks and reds from having been used in his ablutions, and he has drifted from the center of this little shadow of shocking color so as to kneel where it is clean. The great sealskin at his side gleams almost as brightly as the ice. Below, and where the coat is not split to show the red and pink-white of auk, blood, and uqšuq, blubber, it's almost the same shade of light which reflects off the flat of Silna's ulu when the slate is wet, as when newly polished by her tongue.

“Will you follow me?” she asks.

Harry Goodsir's smile tries to twist itself into a frown, as though this possibility had not occurred to him, and as though it makes no sense now that it has. “You would let me follow?” he asks her. He asks with lighthearted disbelief, but famished hope nonetheless begins to gnaw at the edges of his bemusement.

“How else will you return my akulik to me?” she says. Her tone is no longer a question, but one of teasing.

He blinks several times in rapid succession and is then all at once absolutely flabbergasted with gratitude, any wariness devoured. “Oh,” he says, scrambling to his feet. “Oh, of. Of _course,_ why. Well, it would be my _honor.”_

“That's decided, then,” says Silna, and she gives him another soft, encouraging smile.

Harry Goodsir beams at her, takes a few steps, trips over his own faintly-webbed feet, and falls before Silna can catch him. He lands heavily on the palms of his hands and the amauti hood flops forward to completely engulf his head in its voluminous depth, the hood's trim sweeping the ice.

“I'm all right!” he calls out almost immediately. The hood muffles his voice a touch but cannot muffle his audible embarrassment. When he pushes himself up and then raises the amauti hood he is blushing, and with his complexion, and with the outer blood for the most part washed away, the living blood which rises from inside of him and right to his cheeks and ears is vivid in its visibility. “It's, ah, been some time since I've. Since _legs,”_ Harry Goodsir stutters.

If he _is_ toward bad, he is the best actor Silna has ever come across in her life.

“Would you let me help put your sealskin on my sled?” she asks.

He is regaining his feet, and pretends that he does not flinch. Even after he has obliquely granted her a rictus of diffidence his throat works for some time before he can say anything past his clenched teeth. “I'll do that myself, but thank you,” he answers her, hoarsely.

Terrified. From terror to trust to terror, or perhaps it is both at once and always was.

She nods and then drifts back.

And so it is that Harry Goodsir drags the gray sealskin to the sled all on his own: Drags it by a clawless, boneless fore-flipper which stretches beyond what is natural, the shining island of the blubber-lined skin migrating toward the qamut in jiggling increments as he shuffles backward in front of it, bent to reach.

Sturdy black toenails as thick and ridged as pieces of mussel shell click and scrape against the ice whenever he loses stride, which is frequently, and he leaves a fading trail of bloody footprints and a great smear of auk-red from the skin as he goes. He almost trips again and is discreetly panting through his nose with his lips pressed together by the time that he has gotten to the qamut and dropped the seal limb, and he shakily sits again once he has, once more folding his legs under himself and kneeling on the ice parallel to Silna's sled rather than making a seat on it without permission. He goes to his knees there, tucking the amauti's front coattail beneath them with the graceful sway of the fringes, and does not look at her.

Whenever he is not smiling at her his gaze avoids hers as if it brings him guilt to be under it. She wonders if he can only bear to look straight at her if it is in gratitude.

Silna picks up the water flask and goes to sit on the sled beside him. He tenses as she walks past the sealskin, but she ignores this. The tuktu antler crosspieces lashed atop the sled's tall driftwood runners flex slightly as her weight settles on the hides, the qamutiik sliding on their streamlined shoeings of clear ice adhered to the wood by the dark layer of mashed mossy peat frozen in between. Harry Goodsir's toes are, however, safely out of the runners' way as they slide, and it takes more of a budge than this to knock Silna off a qamut; none of this but only Harry Goodsir himself truly concerns her.

She passes him the tuktu fur bag she uses to keep herself off the ice while waiting for seals and he understands. Brushes some grittier grains of ice from his lividly pinked knees before he settles them onto the much kinder fur, his legs still pressed together primly tight, and now with even his toes curled.

Together they regard the sealskin.

After a while Harry Goodsir clears his throat. “I've decided I wouldn't mind if you would be so kind as to... to lend me your assistance in getting _this_ onto _there,_ please, after. After all.”

He's unable to conceal his exhaustion now, as Silna supposes he had been doing, and it _is,_ indeed, exhaustion. His unsteady hands twist and then flatten to slide atop the long tail of the amauti. The luxuriant wolf's mane fur of the amauti hood's ruff moves constantly in the wind, an untouched snowy white to the supple, pale off-white of the inside-out tuktu hide, and Harry Goodsir's curly brown hair is tousled dry enough that it reluctantly does so as well— to some extent— but his expression is defeated into stillness.

“Yes, of course,” says Silna. After another moment she says, “My nua will be here very shortly.” The dark soles of Nikšaaqtuarjuk's kamiik can now be seen as he hurries toward them while striking the hooked end of his unaaq against the ice in front of his feet to test its soundness, the crying qipmiq straining at the end of her leash. Harry Goodsir looks from the floe edge and follows her glance toward Nikšaaqtuarjuk. “We can rest until then,” she says, and the seal-person looks back to her.

“Thank you— _very_ much,” says Harry Goodsir, mustering up another grateful smile.

She waits until he has looked away, and he looks away in shame, when his gratitude is outlasted by it. To distract him from _this_ inexplicable reflex of _his,_ this shame, she is driven to ask, “Was there a reason you were as a seal for so long?”

At first she thinks she has tripped another snare, that he is going to suddenly be upset again, but he looks at her now with placid dispassion and says: “Oh, never mind that, for I certainly can't bear to. I'm most surprised by... by how really long it's been. I wasn't... why, I didn't even have _this,_ for example.” He combs some more at his beard.

“Is it because of how long it's been for you in the sea, that you don't know where you're from?” asks Silna.

Harry Goodsir nods and answers shortly in the affirmative.

It may be that he is skating across disclosure of whatever it is he “cannot bear” because he genuinely can't bear it, and she thinks this is the case; there is trauma in whatever drove him to the sea, as there's an obvious reason he's touching his facial hair as though only just discovering it.

“Did you die as a child, to have turned into a seal?” she asks too bluntly, for he had died as a seal to turn into a person.

“I do believe I drowned,” Harry Goodsir answers, too serenely. “And then I was a seal pup who grew into the seal who heard your song, and in the moment I came as you asked. It was all very straightforward.”

“You heard my irinaliuti?” she asks. For some reason she finds this another genuine surprise. She has one, passed on to her by her adoptive mother Qimirluk, which she sometimes sings for luck in finding game. Silna had walked away from her family's tracks and sang it when alone.

“It was beautiful,” Harry Goodsir says, twisting to look back at her over his shoulder. “I'd only been listening to whale song before I heard your voice so far as, as musical compositions, and listening to them, go. Goes. A refreshing experience, to have heard human song echoing underwater, for once, instead of songs of whales or the chirps of all those fish. Far more ethereal and, ah, uplifting. Ha.” He daintily coughs himself to a stop. Under his full beard his cheeks are again as pink as his knees.

“My irinaliuti compelled you?” Such an incantation was not meant to work in such a way.

“No. No, I heard it echoing, and I chose. I chose to follow it. It was like... swimming up to the sunlight. Which is what it also was, in the literal fashion, but what I mean is— Oh, merely: Human voice. It had been so long since I'd heard a human voice I'd almost forgotten. When I heard yours... I'd wanted to remember. It was the oddest— _epiphany...”_ He trails off, staring away from Nikšaaqtuarjuk and toward the edge, the hinaa; the lead has broadened and the jagged floes make a bass susurrus as the currents move them, churning languidly by beyond the rugged blue ribbon of open water which now trims the shorefast hiku.

The dog's whining has turned to alarm howls and is becoming loud. When Silna next looks she can make out Nikšaaqtuarjuk's expression even with his snow goggles strapped over his eyes, and much farther on she sees Ivalu's husband, his shape miniature as he rounds the faraway outcrop of land. Silna's father Aja is with him. If Silna were to take her aarŋuaq from around her neck, cut open the pouch, and hold the amulet up at the end of her arm, she could make the ivory figurine appear as if the same size as those two men.

One of her father's helping tuurŋait is a nanurluk. This great bear dwarfs even the most mountainous of the icebergs, and is largely invisible among them, much the same as a nanuq of blood, bone, and flesh might be if hunting. The nanurluk will be hers one day, for when she is ready her father means to entrust her with it, and will give her the aarŋuaq carved for the nanurluk from the many aarŋuat which rattle on his shaman's belt; it was his first-made, as the one around Silna's neck was hers, and he has had the nanurluk for longer than any of his other helpers.

Nikšaaqtuarjuk has broken into a swiftening jog and now passes straight through the puddles of freshwater which dapple the ice in blotchy pools of collected melt, breaking the crystalline reflections of the sky into competing waves. The more he lifts his feet from the water so as to jump forth the deeper a plunking sound is made when his feet plunge back into the water, and the higher the splash. His kamiik will keep him dry, as will his waterproof nattiq coat and trousers. His hair is cut in a swoop like a wing across his forehead, and his bangs fly as he runs, leash in one hand and the long unaaq leaning at an angle in the other so that it will not trip him.

“Should I be worried?” Harry Goodsir asks. “I fear that I feel I should be worried.”

Silna stands from the qamut and goes to the nearest fresh puddle, where she crouches to fill the waterskin and then rinses her hands. By the time that she has stood again, shaking water droplets from her fingertips, her dear little niŋiuq has slowed, leaning back a bit and calling his dog to heel. The dog moans and whines as Nikšaaqtuarjuk limits them to a walk. It takes a lot for her to be held back, as she is a good sled dog, and loves hauling.

“Oh, I'm much less frightened now,” Harry Goodsir goes on to narrate, in tone quite mellow and in word true, and Silna knows this as truth for any half-decent aŋakkuq would know were a lie put before them, but even so Harry Goodsir is also getting up to stand between Nikšaaqtuarjuk and the sealskin.

She goes from her qamut to meet him, and, as soon as he is close, Silna's nephew asks while rushing to her, _“Inŋutara!_ Who is that? How are you?”

“I'm _fine,”_ Silna says, catching his head so she can bend it down toward hers and kiss his cheek, and then she shakes him a little by his shoulders. “Niŋiunnuałłuk, you needn't worry; all is well.”

“Is that only your akulik which they're wearing? Where are their clothes?” he continues, now in soft, aghast confusion, and as always his voice is surprisingly deep for his slimness; a bright ice-echo baritone. “What— Is that _blood,_ dripping from their hair? Are _they_ all right?”

“Yes. And they are not hurt.”

The dog, Kamik, continues to dance and fuss at the stranger, her tail and ears curled down as she runs from where she was tugging at the end of her leash and then back to them for reassurance. Silna seizes her by the harness to forcibly still her and she subsides, licking her muzzle in unease.

“Where did they come from?” Nikšaaqtuarjuk asks.

“I cut that person, Harry Goodsir, out from inside of the sea mammal whose skin you see,” she says.

Nikšaaqtuarjuk says, “I see.” He's looking at the sealskin and from there back to Harry Goodsir, and his bangs have fallen to brush the tops of his snow goggles. He's still panting from having ran, mouth hanging open and a sheen of sweat hiding in his fine mustache. His breath cannot be seen, as the sunlight's warmth has scrubbed it away, and Silna, sans goggles, must squint. After another moment he says, “Actually I don't see. Are they a tuurŋaq? Are they to be a helper of yours?”

“No,” says Silna, “they're a vagrant being, I think, wandered from faraway waters. It is too soon for me to speak of anything else with surety, except that I want to help them.” She cautiously releases Kamik's harness and Kamik sinks to her belly, wagging her tail and grumbling every now and then under her breath.

“Not of Nuliajuk's domain,” says Niŋiunnuałłuk, more in absent speculation than anything, and Silna grasps his shoulders rather tight for his blitheness of speech, there on the ice as they were, the sleek nattiq fur soft more so in the one direction, and Silna with her fingers going against this prickliness of irascible grain, more up than down. She must reach up to hold him, nowadays, as he is growing tall, and Silna gives in to the urge to kiss him again, briefly pressing her nose to his cheek.

Eyes closed, breath pulling in. When she draws away there is the familiar nattiq fur of his coat, the dorsal fur dark as soot, the soot cleared by an artistic fingertip into rings which accumulate and overlap and lead to wholly silver edges, not slate but steel, like her big sister Ivalu's ulu. As confident as Silna is that Harry Goodsir isn't of ill will, she is all the same overcome by a swell of tremendous relief to have her niŋiunnuałłuk here to accompany her, so that she is not alone with a stranger.

It is apparent that Harry Goodsir is visible to Nikšaaqtuarjuk, too. And with another person to witness this alongside her, it will be less possible for Silna's memory to be altered to make her forget the encounter, as a tuurŋaq might alter someone's were such a meeting kept secret all to oneself.

She lets Nikšaaqtuarjuk go and turns, and Harry Goodsir looks down at his feet and idly scratches his toenails on the ice as if to pretend innocence of staring at the two of them. The long-tailed amauti does not fit him as well as it does Silna— to whom it has of course been tailored— and it is perhaps too snug in the sleeves, his frame just slightly broader and larger, but the otherwise roomy cut with the artfully boxy shoulder which allows for a child to be moved inside the amauti from the back to the front also allows for the breadth of Harry Goodsir's human torso, and certainly none of the seams are in danger of bursting. Silna's shoulders might be the same width as his are, and squarer, for he oft slumps his in deference and hers are strong from people's work.

Silna's gaze is drawn to studying the aesthetic juxtaposition of what would seem to be a man's hairy legs emerging from between the two long, feminine coattails of the akulik. Though she thinks Harry Goodsir has much shame, wearing an ostensible woman's clothes does not contribute to it, and Silna wonders if Harry Goodsir comes from so different a place that he cannot tell men's and women's fashions apart, or if, just possibly, Harry Goodsir is somehow like Silna.

She was raised with the gender of her namesake, the father of her mother Qimirluk, and so Silna had been dressed and taught accordingly, as a boy, from the time he'd been old enough to wear a coat and trousers. Silna's dear little grandmother had also been clothed as _his_ namesake, in a beautiful little amauti of his own and with his hair in braids, but only when young. When old enough to observe the hunt with his father Nikšaaqtuarjuk was transitioned from the clothes of an arnaq to those of an aŋut and welcomed the exchange, whereas Silna kept the clothes of his choosing— usually changing between fashions when changing between roles, as it is easier for her to hunt in masculine attire, and likewise easier for him to carry a child or keep his sewing off the ground in a feminine akulik— and neither was Silna ever tattooed with the beauty lines of womanhood. Silna was supported in this not only as his parents' beloved child, but also as Aja's student in aŋakkuuniq and all its transcendence of categories, the potential for which was part of why Aja and his wife, herself an aŋakkuq, had adopted Silna from Aja's sister, Nikšaaqtuarjuk's daughter Kiinaq, the waters of whose womb had sustained both Silna and Ivalu as well as that of their older brother, Kiinaq's eldest child by her first husband.

This is not to say that Silna's identity is that of a man's— yet, and crucial to Silna specifically: Nor is he a woman. Silna presents differently at different times in accordance to that which will allow them life and happiness; every now and then he comes into her own or vice versa, but Silna themself is the same, and has always found respect and acceptance for this.

As it is, Harry Goodsir's transformation remains the most probable reason for any of the seal-person's superficially comparable idiosyncrasies. Much as she shouldn't look only for their differences, Silna also mustn't get ahead of herself, here and now, and speculate upon similarities.

“They're coming over here,” says Nikšaaqtuarjuk, of Harry Goodsir.

Silna waits, curling her hand around the loop at the top of Kamik's harness, and Nikšaaqtuarjuk does not run away, and so Harry Goodsir's toenails click to a halt in front of them both.

“Lovely to meet you,” says Harry Goodsir, and he holds out his hand in greeting.

After the barest of hesitations Nikšaaqtuarjuk reaches out to clasp it but Harry Goodsir's hand is already withdrawing, flinching to tuck his arm protectively up against his chest with his hand gripping the parka's hood, for Kamik made a whiny noise at the movement of Harry Goodsir's arm when it was extended and all of Harry Goodsir's bravery regarding not only the dog but the display of his own black nails and webbed fingers flees him. There then transpires to be an amusing exchange in which Harry Goodsir and Silna's niŋiunnuałłuk each reconsider the moment either of them have missed the other's hand in reaching out, and therefore draw their own away, just as the hand of the other is once more politely re-extended.

When their hands do meet Nikšaaqtuarjuk winces, playfully, at the unnecessary firmness with which Harry Goodsir's hand squeezes Nikšaaqtuarjuk's in its grip. Harry Goodsir, taking this playacted pain as serious, drops Nikšaaqtuarjuk's hand as though burned by it, and retreats a bit, saying, “Sorry, sorry... oh, I do apologize. I'm Harry Goodsir. And I haven't quite caught your name? Or, ah, anyone's... name?”

There appears a wrinkle in Nikšaaqtuarjuk's brow as Harry Goodsir speaks, and as soon as Harry Goodsir is not, Nikšaaqtuarjuk leans over to Silna and says, “I cannot understand a single thing they say outside of...” and her nephew pauses before valiantly approximating the pronunciation of the name: “...Haaři Gudsiř.”

“Oh, as I do not speak in the manner of people who speak like _a person,”_ says Harry Goodsir. “I quite understand.”

“They understand you,” Silna says to Nikšaaqtuarjuk.

“It's a, a 'gift' of mine kin,” Harry Goodsir embellishes, a fount as free as that of a babbling brook. He smiles on, friendly and nervous and thereby all the more utterly earnest, and his teeth are very white, stainless and unworn, as the set of seal dentition which remains with the skin is not. He folds his hands in front of himself and perches on the balls of his feet, his knuckles squeezing whiter with every wobble. “Though, 'Haari,' that's gay to the ear! I, I-I like it, _very_ much! Thank you.”

“I'm Little Belcher,” says Nikšaaqtuarjuk.

“Ptarmigan?” Harry Goodsir repeats, sort of.

 _“Tàrmachan?”_ Silna attempts, phonetically true to the language which must be all that Nikšaaqtuarjuk can hear when Harry Goodsir says _aqiřgiq,_ concentrating until she can recall the foreign phonemes as she had learned to recall those of the shaman's language, when Aja and Qimirluk had taught Silna to speak aŋakkuqtut, and it is as if it is all memory, all evocative metaphor, though this new language slips away again as does steam from the hands. A rainbow bifurcates the aura of light around Harry as it might a cloud of water vapor, and the crystals of color split and shiver through each other the more she squints to make him out.

An ache is developing in her head, and a sweet, powerful sludge of an affection in her heart which she can feel pulsing through her blood all the way to her fingertips. As if her welted hands want her to touch him. Perhaps she will clasp his shoulder, now that he is clothed, and see if she can in that way offer comfort to him.

“For 'little croaking one,' yes, oh how _lovely,”_ effuses the visitor, this time uttering the Nattilik Inuktitut for Nikšaaqtuarjuk's name, as though they are effortlessly hearing all language at once, as though it is not steam but water flowing unto the waters of themself, and Harry Goodsir of a sudden seems most queer for their gayness, for gaiety, and Silna is glad to have found them.

Nikšaaqtuarjuk removes his snow goggles and hands them to Silna. Her nephew blinks, free of them, and then also squints; he resembles her very much, as Ivalu and Silna very much resemble each other, and as Ivalu's eldest takes after her far more than his father. His eyes usually appear as guilelessly larger than are Silna's, except for when he is squinting so, as he suchlike is now that Silna has fastened his goggles over her own eyes and the glare of the sunlight, reflected off the ice at all angles, is for her cut into only the bearable portion permitted to filter through the single horizontal slit through the shield of ivory, so that Silna feels her eyes relax even as she watches Nikšaaqtuarjuk's tense to the sun. Impulsively, she hugs him, and then pushes him away, saying, “Go now to your uncle and inform him, while I stay here, with them.”

“Aye, inŋutannuałługa,” Silna's niŋiunnuałłuk says, in warm trust of her decision, and then he hands her Kamik's leash and turns to run back toward the way from which they'd come, toward Silna's father and brother-in-law.

“And you,” says Silna to Harry. To her Harry, she supposes, and she anticipates the luminous flare of Harry Goodsir's expression, that gratitude again a needlepoint prickle. She wonders if being around Harry will leave this reciprocal affection inside of her as permanently as the tattooist's bone needle would drive the lampblack mixture into Sister's skin; an ink for outlining graphics of tenderness has already filled the chambers of Silna's heart to spilling. “Sit down beside me on the sled,” she says to them, “and I will give you my stockings, to keep your feet from the ice.”

 


End file.
